They bring all kinds of foreign goods adapted for Chinese wants--cheap pistols and revolvers, mirrors, scales, fancy pictures, and a thousand gewgaws useful as well as attractive--and they return with opium.

They travel in bands, marching in single file, their carrying poles pointed with a steel spearhead two feet long, serving a double use--a carrying pole in peace, a formidable spear in trouble.
Everywhere they can be distinguished by their dress, by their enormous oiled sunshades, and by their habit of tricing their loads high up to the carrying pole.

They are always well clad in dark blue; their heads are always cleanly shaved; their feet are well sandalled, and their calves neatly bandaged.

They have a travelled mien about them, and carry themselves with an air of conscious superiority to the untravelled savages among whom they are trading.

To me they were always polite and amiable; they recognised that I was, like themselves, a stranger far from home.
This is the class of Chinese who, emigrating from the thickly-peopled south-eastern provinces of China, already possess a predominant share of the wealth of Borneo, Sumatra, Java, Timor, the Celebes and the Philippine Islands, Burma, Siam, Annam and Tonquin, the Straits Settlements, Malay Peninsula, and Cochin China.